


does joe bring flowers to marilyn's grave

by paperclipbitch



Category: Revenge (TV)
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Community: fan_flashworks, Gen, Growing Up, Mental Health Issues, Mental Institutions, Non-Consensual Drug Use, Season/Series 04, canon-typical murders, i love louise so much you guys don't even know, wonder twins feels
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-21
Updated: 2015-08-21
Packaged: 2018-04-16 09:07:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,863
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4619655
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paperclipbitch/pseuds/paperclipbitch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It’s an existence, anyway.</p>
            </blockquote>





	does joe bring flowers to marilyn's grave

**Author's Note:**

> [Title from _Father Lucifer_ by Tori Amos.] Written for **fan_flashworks** for the challenge #128: _floating_. Contains spoilers for all of season four, because I loved Louise so much, where's her spin-off where she and Nolan crush people beneath their perf shoes.

_Nothing's gonna stop me from floating._  
\- Tori Amos

-

Louise is daddy’s favourite.

Mamma buys her new dresses and ties her hair up, doll-like, and Louise sits and lets her and endures Lyman’s teasing and curl-tugging, but it’s daddy saying that she looks pretty that finally makes her smile.

She’s happy to drift through her days, ignoring the slammed doors and the shouts and the scowls and the bitter edges of her world getting smaller and smaller and smaller, a bounce of summertime and ribbon and white little-girl teeth.

And then mama and daddy are shouting until they’re not anymore, and there are sirens, and Louise can’t stop looking at her hands, little hands with little fingers, brittle and shaking. 

“It’s okay,” her mama says later, putting her own, bigger, hand over Louise’s. “I don’t think that you meant to.”

Louise blinks at her, and has no idea what she’s talking about.

-

Louise is seventeen, and she likes boys and lipstick and the way her head slips and slides when she combines the contents of mama’s liquor cabinet with the pills she has to take.

Lyman is away at college and he was never very good at the protective older brother, and mama sets her a curfew but she’s never home these days to see whether Louise observes it, which she doesn’t, more often than not. Louise still likes pretty dresses and dressing up, and she likes the backseats of rich boys’ cars, and poolhouses with the lights turned off, and her own bedroom with the blinds open, moonlight on her closed eyelids. Her breasts came in – and how – and while boys smirk at her like they know something that she doesn’t, she can still have whichever ones she wants, every time, a crook of a finger and bam, bam, bam, drop them all in a line.

She’s sick, because she’s always been sick, been sick so long that she doesn’t even remember what it was like not to be sick, perhaps she was never well, and her mama doesn’t like to talk about it, dabs a clean cologned handkerchief to each of her dry eyes at too many questions. Lyman is worse, pats her head like daddy used to and kisses her forehead like daddy used to, but he’s not daddy, and Louise misses the days when she had allies in this family, not just closed doors and white pills and a brain where everything ebbs and flows around in whatever order it chooses, until she picks a train of thought at random and leaps on it.

Louise is crazy, but it’s easy enough to be rich and crazy; act docile at dinner parties and lower your eyes like the most demure of meek little girls, and the rest of the time you can do what you like and no one looks too close or too hard, like maybe crazy is catching. Louise does whatever she wants, most of the time, rebelling as hard and loud as she knows how, but mama either doesn’t care or doesn’t notice, and by now she’s so used to it she just lets the current of her party girl persona drag her along, it’s easier than her other options.

It’s an existence, anyway.

-

Louise is tired, has screamed herself out, and the drugs here are better than any she had at home.

She can’t really believe that mama would have her committed, finally, shut away from the rest of the world. She hasn’t done anything new, she doesn’t think, nothing _worse_ anyway, just plugged away being the crazy daughter with a sharp dress sense and a sensuous smile. It’s quite the role, and she’s played it long enough.

There’s got to be some way out of here, something to do that might change things, but she can’t _think_. Her brain can’t focus, thoughts dragging through her hands even when she digs her nails in, and there’s nothing in here to pin herself too. Plain walls, harsh light, and nothing of herself that they’ll let her keep. 

“Lulu,” her mom says, and she’s not here, not real, and Louise scrunches her eyes closed and scrunches her mouth shut and turns resolutely away. This happens sometimes, her worst fears and sharpest desires coming at her from the mouth of her imagined mother, not herself, and it’s worse than if she was saying them to herself. She was never mamma’s favourite, never, and now she has her proof: finally, she’s been cut loose, set adrift, the world a slammed door and a bleach-scented uniform away.

-

Louise is married, and not insane after all, and not a murderer, and now she’s not exactly sure who she is with all these new ways to define her. She’s free, and she’s never been free before, not from her family and not from herself and not from her own reputation.

She lies in her pool with the Hamptons sunshine pouring down on her like syrup over waffles, sweet and free and _hers_ , and her hair waves around her like silk. Maybe this is what it would be like to be a mermaid, to swim through the sea and worry about nothing and no one. She’s not a child anymore, not even an enforced child, but with her mind clear bits and pieces are returning in a way she’d completely forgotten.

She opens her eyes, rights herself carefully so as not to splash the lenses of her sunglasses, and finds that Nolan is lounging by the pool and watching her from beneath the brim of a stylishly tilted sunhat.

“Hey, Water Baby,” he says, and Louise wonders if anyone has ever gotten her like he has, he and Emily both, who dug through the rubble to find what was left of her when she had long ago stopped looking. Who found her a truth she didn’t know she was hiding, and dusted it off and held it up for the world to see.

She swims over to the side, where he’s laying down a cocktail glass on the sun-warmed concrete, rim dipped in pink sugar, an umbrella lolling in the liquid, and kicks her legs to keep her afloat while she reaches to take a sip.

Nolan’s lips curl, and he’s amused, but not laughing at her. People don’t do that anymore, and she doesn’t know what to do with it.

“If you moved up a bit, you could put your feet down,” he remarks.

Louise thinks about the slick tiles, about solid ground, and shakes her head. “I like it this way,” she says.

-

Louise is alone.

She’s never been alone before, not really; not with mama keeping the strings to her purse and all the other parts of her life, and Lyman at the other end of a phone, checking up on her. Not with doctors and therapists and others flitting in and out of her life, a cornucopia of people to talk to, even if none of them cared and she didn’t know what she was really trying to achieve.

She had a husband for a while, and a friend, who felt more like another part of herself than a separate human being, though it turns out that most of that was in her head, and he wasn’t so much a lie as less than she needed him to be. Nolan looks sad when he sees her, and wistful, and Louise doesn’t know what she wants anymore.

Maybe what she wants isn’t to _want_.

And her brother is dead, which isn’t her fault but _is_ her fault, though she’ll be keeping her mouth shut on that one because she thinks in the end she’ll be able to sleep at night again, all things considered. It’s a brutal truth, and one that makes her think that maybe she’s as bad as her mamma always said that she was, but her family was a lie living beneath the skin of something else entirely, and stripping it back revealed something so sickening Louise is happy to live in some kind of lie after all. Her brother was drunk, and he fell, and she was never there. Never.

She pinned her hopes, you see, to anyone who showed her kindness, and she can see that now, as Victoria Grayson lies dead for the second time, the _real_ time, who wanted nothing from her but what she could help her achieve, and Louise wanted someone who would treat her better than her mamma but that turned out to be just as impossible as everything else. Louise thought Victoria loved her, _really_ loved her, but it turns out it was just her being naïve again, frantic or desperate or lonely, they all look the same in the right lighting.

Louise didn’t go to Victoria Grayson’s second funeral; she’s not sure that anyone did.

So, what Louise has is her money, which is new, and herself, which isn’t. But could be.

-

The Hamptons are quieter these days, with Amanda and Jack off on their honeymoon, and the Grayson and Clarke families gone from the landscape, and the backstabbing has returned to the kind you do with smiles behind cocktails; the hypothetical kind, not the literal kind.

Louise has a house of her own, now, and she visits Margaux in prison every week, and they might just be becoming something like friends, with these new people they’ve had to become. She doesn’t hate it.

She likes playing the stylist divorcée, sipping a margarita and swapping sharp-edged stories with the other Hamptons ex-wives, half of whom are on the prowl for new ones. Louise would like one, one day, but she’s happy to wait for a little longer. She’s got a lot to learn: about the world, about herself, before she willingly hands anything over to anyone else again.

Nolan is sadder without David and Jack and Amanda, a little diminished perhaps, but the next time she drops by his club for a drink and an exchange of gossip, she recognises the glitter of purpose in his eyes.

“Got a new project?” she asks, idly stirring a stick of cocktail olives in her drink.

Nolan laughs, caught, and ducks his head. “I do,” he says, and adds: “want in on the ground floor again? We were pretty good Wonder Twins.”

Louise considers it, _really_ considers it for a moment. She hated the cruelty, the bitterness, everyone’s determination to get revenge, to strip back each other’s skin until there was nothing left at all. But it was exciting, to have that kind of a mission, that kind of involvement in something beyond herself. She can see why Nolan loves it the way that he does.

“I think,” she says carefully, “that I need to practice being my own Wonder Twin.”

Nolan’s smile is a little sad, a little pained, a little pleased, a little proud. She’s never seen him smile like that before, and definitely not at her, and it’s sweet and awful all at once; she basks in it.

He holds out a fist and she bumps hers against it anyway.

Louise floats out of the bar, but underneath each step of her wedge sandals, she feels the solid ground beneath.

-


End file.
